Question 1 - In what ways does you media product us, devlop or challende forms and conventions of real media products?

A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms or criteria. Applying this to a media product, conventions are particular things that an audience expects to be in that genre/sub-genre. Different audiences of different ages and genders are drawn to particular films for the atmosphere that the film creates or even the type of characters that are involved in it.

 

These images establish the sub genre of the Film. The audience can see that they are both a demand kind of threat due to the ‘Spider crawl’ of the bottom character and the satanic symbols on the top character. Both of the pictures include stairs, this makes an atmosphere as in both scenes the ‘Threat’ character either crawls up the stairs or down them in a jumpy and creepy manner.

Our image uses existing conventions from our sub-genre of ghost/demand as it uses a young girl character that is ‘stalking’ another female character. We also used mise-en-scene to establish a more ‘innocent’ character, such as using a white night gown to show purity. This also uses existing conventions as our chosen sub genre creates a lot of suspense.

Our stairs scene challenges a convention of shot type. Usually a low angle would be used so the audience feels powerless against the threat, however we used a high angle, this was to make the audience feel like the character was crawling up the stairs towards them, so it outs the audience into the other characters place.

These shots establish mise-en-scene. They give an immediate visual hint to the audience to where the ‘action’ will take place. My image uses this to build an atmosphere of suspense, the audience can see the house and also a character leaving the location. This fits in with the storyline as the audience know that a young girl is left inside alone.

A main convention of a ghost/demand horror film is that there is a creepy/old house where weird things happen. My image challenges this as compared to the bottom image from ‘The ring’, the location just looks like a normal house and builds no atmosphere. The bottom image gives off a different mood, the location is a lot more supreme and in power compared to the audience. The low angle shot and dark lighting gives a creepy atmosphere and makes the audience feel on edge. In my scene, the harsh bright lighting doesn’t give this dark effect so atmosphere is lost. Also, the camera angle is eye-line so n power is made between the audience and the location, overall the scene is quite neutral.

These images show the production logo from ym film and the logo from one of our main inspirations 'The Ring'. Our logo has a satanic sign on it, which alot of the audience will be able to recognise. This immediately tells the audience what genre of film is. We have also smudges the red writing to make it look like it is oozing with blood. The ring logo represents the filn, it goes all pixelated over the dreamworks logo just like a tv would. The colours are also dark and creepy.